Gave this a go, really well done. There seems to be a bug in the first lesson already; for whatever reason it's telling me to type the response to the troll in french. If you follow the instructions, it throws syntax and typo errors as it wanted the solution in english. "Show the solution" button provides the output in english as well. Some weird language stuff going on.
This is really really cool! The physicality of it is special and can be a huge help with some people to gain an understanding of whats actually happening on the micro scale. Reminds me very much of "Spintronics", a game that holds a special place in my heart as I could teach a traditionally conceptual topic to my kids.
Are the designs you've come up with 3D printed? I feel like there's a huge possibility of community advancement into this ecosystem (fully appreciating you should make a return on all of your time and creativity).
Thank you! Yeah, I was trying to lean into the idea of "shrink yourself down into a computer and physically manipulate the bits", think it's the best way to understand what computers are actually doing.
Spintronics is really wonderful, not just for its cleverness (which is extreme) but also the total concept and aesthetics -- absolutely something I'm aspiring to.
And yeah these are all 3D printed. Agree with your sentiments around community stuff, I don't have any fixed ideas there but I would be absolutely delighted to see how people can build on this. There are so many possible physical cellular automata to explore; this is just one.
If you ever open up the designs or want another set of eyes to print on some other devices / take a crack at generating new components, please let me know (looking forward to the kickstarter).
There is a help button in the top right that shows you need to focus on the circle node connectors to "solve' the problem.
At least for the first example:
You have a blue box labeled xt with a single node connector at the top.
You have a purple box labeled ht with a node connector at the top and bottom.
You have a green box labeled Yt with a node connector at the bottom.
The game tells you at the top you have 3 edges remaining.
Dragging a line from one node to another, releasing, and it turning green means you have placed a "correct" connection.
i.e. xt -> ht [bottom] will give you a green line.
Repeat until you have all edges solved for.
It's not spelling it out for you, but once you complete the "game" you'll at a very high level understand the moving pieces within the network, and the "flow" of data.
I recently went on a productivity binge and created a whole bunch of interconnected templates that I thought others might benefit from. Any feedback is greatly appreciated as I'm always trying to make the system better over time.
If anything, Firefox on Linux is more likely to get it right, as it will typically be shipped with the font Twemoji Mozilla which includes this flag. I think they don’t ship that font on macOS or Windows, and it sounds like at least the default emoji font stack for Windows doesn’t support this flag.
Most flags are made of two regional indicator symbols, like this for the United Kingdom which has ISO 3166 code GB:
U+1F1EC REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER G
U+1F1E7 REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER B
If the font has flags, it should render this as a Union Jack, but if it doesn’t, it should render something along the lines of “GB” (which, frankly, is generally more useful if you try using flags without labels).
But Scotland has the ISO 3166 code GB-SCT, a format the regional indicators weren’t designed to cope with (for better or for worse), so it uses a different encoding technique and is comprised of the following sequence of seven scalar values:
U+1F3F4 WAVING BLACK FLAG
U+E0067 TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER G
U+E0062 TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER B
U+E0073 TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER S
U+E0063 TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER C
U+E0074 TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER T
U+E007F CANCEL TAG
As you observe, this has a significantly worse fallback behaviour: the tag characters are non-printing, so you get just a black flag.
This is not coming from Font Awesome; you’re using regular emoji, and depending on the host being able to render it. U+1F355 SLICE OF PIZZA has been around since 2010, but the Scotland flag sequence is from 2017 and some platforms have been deliberately not including country flags because they are generally not necessary (though the Scottish flag suffers more than most because of its composition, see my other nearby comment) and they are the subject of a few international disputes (e.g. PRC objects to Taiwan’s flag being included) and so it’s easier to just keep out of it all.
The Precision laptops are designed and marketed towards businesses and professionals (hence why they are on the business solutions section). Speaking generically; you can make a Precision match specs for an XPS but not the other way around. You're able to make a Precision laptop contain much higher specification components. The average computer user wouldn't need those high-end components so they are split into two separate lines and price points.
